Card Games: Games for all ages

By Ian Brookes

40 popular card games, with clear instructions and guidance on how to master each one.

Easy to follow helpful advice on learning more than 40 of the most popular card games. This beautifully presented edition will offer all the help and guidance you need to learn how to play these ever-popular games.

Illustrated throughout with colour diagrams.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins UK
• Release date: Sep 6, 2018
• ISBN: 9780008309282

Book preview

Copyright

HarperCollins Publishers

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First Edition 2018

© HarperCollins Publishers 2018

© Diagram Visual Information 2000, 2004

Collins® is a registered trademark of HarperCollins Publishers Limited www.collins.co.uk

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Editor: Ian Brookes

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Source ISBN: 9780008306533

Ebook Edition © July 2018 ISBN: 9780008309282

Version 2018-07-24

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Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

A history of playing cards

All fives

Auction pitch

Beggar my neighbour

Bezique

Brag

Canasta

Card dominoes

Casino

Clock

Cribbage

Six-card cribbage

Ecarté

Euchre

Fish

Five hundred

Gin rummy

Give away

Go boom

Hearts

Knaves

Knockout whist

Linger longer

My ship sails

Newmarket

Oh hell

Old maid

Pinochle

Piquet

Play or pay

Pontoon

Pope Joan

Racing demon

Rolling stone

Rummy

Scotch whist

Sequence

Seven up

Snap

Snip-snap-snorem

Solitaire (Patience)

Spit

Stealing bundles

War

Whist

Glossary

About the Publisher

Card playing has been a popular pastime among young and old for more than 500 years. This long history and the enormous variety of card games that exist, give card playing its great potential as a plentiful source of entertainment for all ages.

Collins Little Book of Card Games is a fascinating full-colour guide to the rules and strategies for more than 40 exciting games, from all-fives to war, including the likes of euchre, canasta, pinochle and rummy. There’s something for everyone – beginner and expert alike. Also included is an easy-to-use, complete glossary of important terms used in card playing. And with each game, you’ll find the answers to those inevitable debates over rules and scoring.

Most importantly, the book provides detailed instructions and play-by-play diagrams – illustrating techniques and surefire strategies – that will turn even the novice card player into an expert.

The exact time and place when card games were invented cannot be known for certain. However, it is fairly clear that playing cards – just like paper, clocks and fireworks – started life in China, and that the first cards were produced before AD 1000. These cards probably featured symbols that represented coins, and would have looked more like modern-day dominoes than the cards in modern deck.

From China, the use of playing cards spread through Asia, and it was the Mamelukes, a group of soldiers who had established a powerful empire in Egypt, who introduced playing cards to Europe around 1370. The earliest European packs had 52 cards divided into four suits, just like a standard modern pack, although the designs on the cards were markedly different from what we know today.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE FOUR SUITS

The playing cards that came from Egypt contained designs influenced by Islamic culture, with cups, swords, coins and polo sticks. As cards became popular across Europe, different countries would produce variations on these designs that made more sense to the local people. Thus the polo stick – which was not known in Europe at the time – was transformed into a baton in southern Europe, while in Germany the symbols of acorns, leaves, hearts and bells eventually became standard.

At this point playing cards were hand-painted, and so they were expensive to produce and could only be afforded by rich people. However, around 1480, French manufacturers realised that by making the patterns on the cards simpler, the cards would be cheaper to produce. They came up with four simple shapes that could be drawn using a stencil: the trefoil (the modern club), the diamond, the heart, and the pike-head (the modern spade).

The new French designs made playing cards available to many more people, and the French pack has gradually became accepted as the international standard. However, there are still regional variations that can be dated back to the earlier suit designs, such as bells being used as a suit in Germany and Switzerland or cups being a suit in Italy and Spain.

OTHER CHANGES IN THE PACK

The idea of having thirteen cards of a different value in each suit was already present when cards arrived in Europe. The one significant difference was that the early sets had three male court cards: a king, a knight and a servant. The queen was later added instead of the servant and was given a value between the knight and the king, and the knight was also renamed as the ‘knave’ or ‘jack’.

The pack has changed in other ways over the years too. Until around 1800 the backs of the cards were plain white. This meant that the cards could be discoloured and even deliberately marked, and by remembering these marks a dishonest player might be able to know the value of a card that was face down or in an opponent’s hand. To stop this from happening, manufacturers took to printing coloured designs on the backs of the cards.

Another relatively late innovation to make playing card games fairer was the idea of adding the number and suit of each card in the corner as well as in the middle of the card. Before this was done, players had to hold a card away from the rest of their hand to see what it was, and this might expose the card to an opponent’s view. But from the 1860s the value of each card was printed in the corner, and so players could hold their cards together in a tight fan and get a quick view of all the cards in a hand without giving much away.

Around the same time, card manufacturers began to include two jokers in the pack. These cards could be used to stand in for a lost or damaged card so that a pack did not become useless if one card went missing. However, they were also accommodated into various games so that a player with a joker could use it to represent any card in the deck. The fact that the jokers are a late addition to the deck accounts for the fact that not many of the established card games use them.

TYPES OF CARD GAME

The earliest card games seem to have involved a series of rounds in which each player played one card and the card with the highest value won that round or ‘trick’. These games could be made more interesting by having a ‘trump’ suit, so that a card of that suit would automatically beat any card of the other suits.

Early trick-taking games included ‘triumph’ and ‘ombre’ (which introduced the idea of having an auction to decide the trump suit before the hand was played rather than cutting a card to decide the trumps). The game of triumph later evolved into whist, which was widely played in coffee houses and drawing rooms in the eighteenth